Abstract: Ligand exchange on metal complexes provides a powerful and versatile route to recognition in imprinted polymers that is particularly useful in aqueous media where weaker electrostatic interactions are ineffective. Molecular imprinting is used either to assemble metal complexes to complement metal coordinating sites on the target molecule or to create specific binding sites through shape recognition Here I will discuss recently developed chiral ligand exchange adsorbents and polymers for recognition and sensing of sugars in complex biological media. Chiral adsorbents for underivatized amino acids are prepared by coating silica panicles with a polymer imprinted with an achiral Cu(II)-chelating monomer. Racemic phenylalanine is resolved on the resulting materials (~1.6). demonstrating that the molecular imprinting process is capable of imparting the chiral selectivity To prepare polymers for measuring glucose concentrations in biological samples, we used the fact that glucose chelation to various metal ion complexes results in the net release of protons at alkaline pH. Imprinted polymers rebind glucose and release protons in proportion to the glucose concentration. This approach, which combines metal coordination/chelation for sugar binding, ligand exchange for signal transduction, and molecular imprinting to enhance selectivity, could be used to prepare materials for selective sensing of a variety of target carbohydrates